Parenting Books and Experts Really Won't Help You.
I should know.
There's no parenting book for parenting.
And I even wrote one.
Every parenting book I have ever read had one line. One page. One idea. One small thing that made the tiniest shift in me.
And that was it.
And that was enough.
I have learned more about my own parenting through poetry, yoga, myths, koans, fiction, interviews, biographies, and comedy.
Parenting is a science, sure, but it is far more an art for most of us. And you don't "solve" with art.
You play at it, fight with it, rest with it, and wonder at it.
Anne Lamott has taught me more about love, parenting, addiction, and Jesus than all my years in a religion.
Karen Maezen Miller has taught me more about presence, being (and staying) awake, and parenting than any theory book.
Jesmyn Ward has taught me more about family and love and heartache than any systems book.
Kate Bowler has taught me about realistic prayer, hope, and despair, more than any other manual about mourning.
Our American culture has forgotten or let go of the ancient roots and ways of how parents used to grow up their children, as well as grow WITH their children.
I don’t blame us for turning to experts, what with our pat advice and bland observations. Experts give that wonderful dessert of an idea. It seems so pretty and tastes so good…but it’s all cotton candy. Nothing can stick…because well…you don’t change when you listen to an expert. You change when you live and love and suffer and suffer and suffer and learn, and get up and do it all again.
Parenting isn’t walking through wheat fields, holding a child’s hand while you laugh.
Parenting is deep fear and fierce love and the worst news and the best news and anger like you’ve never known. It is giving up your dreams and sex lives and bodies and money and some hope. It is dirty and messy and lonely and loud and tender and intimate and boring.
Above all, parenting is not knowing.
How can you ever know? Know what to do, what to say?
When I face the mess, I pick up Ellen Bass to make it make sense.
Dead Butterfly BY ELLEN BASS For months my daughter carried a dead monarch in a quart mason jar. To and from school in her backpack, to her only friend’s house. At the dinner table it sat like a guest alongside the pot roast. She took it to bed, propped by her pillow. Was it the year her brother was born? Was this her own too-fragile baby that had lived—so briefly—in its glassed world? Or the year she refused to go to her father’s house? Was this the holding-her-breath girl she became there? This plump child in her rolled-down socks I sometimes wanted to haul back inside me and carry safe again. What was her fierce commitment? I never understood. We just lived with the dead winged thing as part of her, as part of us, weightless in its heavy jar.